Rob Weissman: It’s great to be with you, Jon.

JW: How many lawsuits have you filed against Trump?

RW: We’re up around 40 right now.

JW: 40. That’s more than one a month.

RW: It is more than one a month. We’re trying to get up to one a week.

JW: Let’s start with that $1.7 billion fund. Trump calls it “the anti -weaponization fund.” Somehow that has not caught on. And we’re all calling it “the slush fund.”
Two DC cops who helped protect the Capitol on January 6th have gone to court to block it. Let’s give them credit: Daniel Hodges of the Metropolitan Police, and Harry Dunn, a former Capitol Police officer, sued Trump. Their lawsuit begins, “in the most brazen act of presidential corruption this century, President Trump has created a taxpayer funded slush fund to finance the insurrectionists and paramilitary groups that commit violence in his name.” The suit continues, “The fund is illegal. No statute authorizes its creation. The settlement on which it is premised is a corrupt sham, and its design violates the constitution and federal law.” Do you think they’re right about that?

RW: Everything about that statement is correct, except I might edit it to say it’s not just the most corrupt thing in this century, it’s probably the most corrupt presidential action in all of American history.

JW: I didn’t know about the constitutional argument, but it turns out the 14th Amendment prohibits the use of federal money to “pay any debt or obligation incurred in aid of insurrection or rebellion against the United States.” Now, the authors here were obviously thinking about the Confederate debt, but they framed it more broadly, to cover events like January 6th.

RW: That’s 100% right. If the money is to be paid to insurrectionists, that would be unconstitutional. Trump himself is arguably an insurrectionist, in which case this conferment of a benefit on him would be unconstitutional. And if he gets any of this money, which I believe he will, if it is permitted to proceed, that would not only be a violation of the 14th amendment, it would be a violation of the Emoluments Clause, because he’d be getting a gift from the government itself.

JW: And the so-called settlement, we later learned, includes a provision that the government is “forever barred and precluded from prosecuting, pursuing, or examining tax claims against Trump, his sons, the Trump Organization and related companies.” But wait a minute. The original lawsuit sought damages only because Trump’s personal tax return had been leaked. So, isn’t this a little broad as a settlement?

RW: “A little broad,” Jon, I think you’re going to have to work on your vocabulary.

JW: [Laughter] Okay!

RW: Yes, it is a little broad. It is also, in its own right, illegal, at least if it’s tried to be effectuated. It is illegal for the president to ask for any audit or investigation by the IRS to proceed or be terminated. And it’s illegal for anyone else to do it also. So, if the if the acting Attorney General, Todd Blanche, tells people inside the IRS “stop auditing Trump,” that is illegal. If people inside the IRS are told, or receive a request, to stop auditing, or to begin auditing someone, they are required by law to report that to the Treasury Department Inspector General.  And if they fail to make that report, they themselves are subject to five years of imprisonment.

JW: Five years of imprisonment. And who has standing to enforce this?

RW: Well, there’s two parts to that. The criminal law is enforced by the Justice Department. So, this Justice Department obviously will not enforce it.

JW: There will be another Justice Departments.

RW: There will be future justice departments. And we actually wrote to the AG and to the head of the IRS and said, “you need to give a warning to your employees because they’re about to be put in peril for criminal prosecution.”
The bigger issue is what’s the standing for anyone to block this? And you mentioned this lawsuit by the two officers. There are others that have since been filed and more that are going to come. This is obviously illegal in many ways, but the big question is, does anyone have standing, which is the legal concept or the right to sue? The Supreme Court has made standing very difficult in cases where you’re basically saying, “I’m a taxpayer and my money is being taken unjustly.” So that’s going to be the tough part of these cases.

JW: That lawsuit about the slush fund is not one of yours. It’s been brought by something called the Public Integrity Project. This is Russ Feingold, Zephyr Teachout, and attorney Brendan Ballou. He was a January 6th prosecutor, but he resigned from the Justice Department last year after Trump pardoned the Capitol riot participants. But you do have a lawsuit about Trump’s billion-dollar ballroom. Tell us about that one.

RW: Yeah. We do. And we’ve been really leading the charge on the ballroom from the moment it was announced. The lawsuit was to obtain the contract that the administration was offering donors – just to understand, what’s the deal? Like what, literally, what is the deal they’re being offered? And what was interesting – and we succeeded. They didn’t want to give us the document. We got that ordered and now we’ve got it. And what was interesting about it is that it makes clear that they are actively seeking anonymous donations, in a short contract, they use the word “anonymous” 14 times. And what’s important about that is those contributions are not anonymous to the White House. So, if you’re Amazon and you make a contribution anonymously to the ballroom fund, Donald Trump definitely knows about that. And so does everybody else inside the White House. It’s anonymous to the public. So, we don’t get to know about it. So, there are for sure significant anonymous donations that have come in to fund this corrupt and ridiculous ballroom, and we don’t know who it’s come from. Well, we have investigated who the donors are who are known, focusing on the corporate donors. And there’s about two dozen who have been publicly revealed. And they had received $279 billion in government contracts in the previous five years. So, they’ve got a lot at stake. And it’s fair to say their contributions to this ridiculous ballroom are not because they’re hoping to get invited to the ball, at least not to dance, but because they want to get more contracts and more government favors.

JW: So, there are the private donors, and then there’s the $1.7 billion of taxpayers money. The news over the weekend was that even Republicans are rebelling against the slush fund. What’s your understanding of where we stand with Republican opposition to Trump on these expenditures at this point?

RW: Well, it’s a very interesting situation. And this may be the overreach that really cracks the Republican alliance. Anyone who’s not full-on total Trump total MAGA understands how outrageous this is legally and also substantively, because it plainly is intended to give money to the insurrectionists. People who are around Donald Trump and engage in illegality like Rudy Giuliani and Roger Stone, and very, very likely will end up giving, I think, hundreds of millions of dollars to Trump and his family based on a preposterous original legal claim. So, they all see that. But what the problem is, is that they may be held accountable for it. So, they were about to push through a vote in Congress on a spending bill to get even more money to ICE about $75 billion to Ice. But anyway, that was fast tracked, and it was going to move forward with Republican only votes. And this is the posture was it wouldn’t be subject to filibuster because it was done through this process called reconciliation. However, in that process, Democrats are permitted to offer amendments, and they were going to offer amendments saying “no money for the slush fund” and the Republicans are going to be put on record once, twice, many times. Are you for or against the slush fund? And they did not want to take that vote. So, what happened was they told Trump, “Hey, we got to pause.” So, this money that was fast tracked for the administration priority of funding ICE was delayed for we don’t know how long because they’re worried about the slush fund problem, and they don’t have a good solution to it. They’re desperately scrambling to try to figure out what it’s going to be. But they’re angry, the Senate Republicans are, that they’re being put in this position. And they’re angry, too, at Trump for supporting some insurgents against people who are Republican incumbents in the Senate. So, their patience with Trump is beginning to run thin. And of course, their patience does not extend to sacrificing their seats, which many of them are worried they will if they have to take this vote.

JW: Yeah, I just want to underline here: It seems to me there’s a big difference between the slush fund and the billion-dollar ballroom. The billion-dollar ballroom is sort of standard corporate corruption that Republicans and some Democrats engage in. The fund to pay money to the January 6th insurrectionists is supporting a violent attack on democracy itself with taxpayer money? Or am I going too far with this?

RW: No, you’re not. I mean, the only thing to say about the ballroom is that it’s beyond the words stupid and corrupt. Now, the billion-dollar part of it is an effort by Republicans to just sort of bow down to Trump. He actually doesn’t need that money to fund the ballroom. He has, in fact, raised this private, corrupt money to fund the construction of the ballroom. What he really wanted was congressional authorization for the ballroom because that would resolve the lawsuit that that is currently blocking its construction. But you’re right. I mean, by regular historic standards, that’s probably an impeachable offense, but still kind of in the zone of just extreme corruption.
The slush fund is something categorically different altogether. The idea that you would steal taxpayer money and pay it out to people who launched an insurrection against the government, who engaged in violence against police officers, who threaten the lives of members of Congress and even the Republican vice president of the United States–that for sure has no precedent in American history. And it’s apparently finally a bridge too far for Republicans in Congress, or at least some of them.

JW: You have something like 40 lawsuits right now against Trump. Let’s talk about a couple of the most significant ones. I’m especially interested in your litigation around the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, because it’s much broader than consumers. It’s about whether the president can dismantle federal agencies on his own, basically. Tell us about that one.

RW: Well, we’ve been involved in two. The first that we filed is still ongoing, but we’ve handed it off to someone else to deal with. That one was over originally over the closure. And while we had original success in that case, subsequently we had trouble. The theory is, look, Congress created the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, called the CFPB, and only Congress can close it. And that’s pretty straightforward – basic 11th grade civics, separation of powers. The judge, however, said the case really wasn’t about closing the agency. It was really about whether the firing of all the people who worked at the agency was legal or not. And unfortunately, issues of employment for federal workers are resolved through a single federal arbitration system, for which you cannot otherwise go to federal court. And the judge treated it as a mass firing case instead of an agency closure case. That’s been a problem in a lot of these agency closure cases. So that one, that part of the case is still ongoing. The CFPB is still hobbling along with lots of people who are on administrative leave, now, a year into the term and a few hundred who are performing some of the basic functions of the agency.
Then Russ Vought, who people will know as the director of OMB and really the mastermind of the most of what the aggressive Trump agenda is outside of the immigration space. Russ came up with this scheme to say, well, the CFPB was prohibited from asking for funding. And it’s a little technical why that was, but he made the case. And of course, if they couldn’t get any funding, then there wouldn’t be any – the agency could still exist on paper, but it wouldn’t exist in reality. So, we sued separately over that case. We have succeeded so far, and we’re on a path to win that case outright.

JW: Among your many other cases, I was also very interested in your suit over shutting down the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health. This is the one that that enforces workplace safety, not particularly Trumpish. Again, kind of a Republican idea, but a really big one.

RW: Yeah. So, the agency is the acronym is N-I-O-S-H. So it’s called “NIOSH” — it’s part of the NIH, the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health. But it does think – its primary focus kind of conceptually is studying workplace safety and making recommendations to protect workers from on the job harms. But it also has some specific responsibilities, including studying and operating programs for coal miners and for firefighters and first responders. So, the Trump people probably didn’t realize that when they moved to shut it down, because that means that NIOSH has a constituency that’s not just people who are labor sympathetic. It has a constituency that includes West Virginia senators and people who are concerned about firefighters, which for sure crosses party lines. So, we filed suit over this closure. And the lawsuit and political pressure led the administration to rehire the overwhelming majority of people they were trying to get rid of. And that’s sort of the resolution of that case even before we got a judicial ruling. So that was a success. And the lawsuit, you know, helped keep the agency alive. The political pressure, in combination with the lawsuit made the administration reverse. And we still have more or less a functioning NIOSH.

JW: And are there other cases that you regard as your most significant victories?

RW: Well, we’ve had quite a few victories. A lot of the cases where there’s victories are still – there’s still ongoing litigation. One which was kind of a small thing, but really important because of the abuses of the first Trump administration, Congress passed a law that said the Office of Management and Budget, that’s that same office that Russ Vogt runs is required to publish something called an apportionments database, which is to show how, in fact, the government is spending appropriated funds because the worry was, okay, Congress appropriates the money, but are they really spending it, or are they really spending it the way Congress intended? And the answer is no, but the answer is no, in this second term, way beyond anything that we saw in the first term. So, Russ Vought didn’t want people to have that information at all. He simply refused to publish the database. We’ve sued and the database is now up and it’s now possible to track how they’re misspending and not spending money. It’s worth highlighting that we have a case also challenging Donald Trump’s proposed construction of a massive arch right across the water from Washington, D.C., blocking the vista from Arlington National Cemetery to the Lincoln Memorial.
So, it turns out in the construction of Arlington National Cemetery, that vista was intended to honor the dead. It turns out that it’s not permissible to build memorials in the Washington, D.C., area without congressional authorization, which, of course, Trump does not have. So, we’ve sued over that. And so far, that’s been slowed. Although they’re now saying they’re going to try to move forward, which means our case is going to speed up. So, we have these 40 cases, roughly. And of course, where we’re defending people who lost their jobs. We have a constituency that is super passionate, so much at stake and it’s so deeply felt. But leaving those cases aside, there is nothing we have done that has generated the outpouring of concern and support so much as this arch case. Veterans, especially Vietnam vets, really care about this issue. They really take offense to what Trump is trying to construct. You know, we’re very hopeful that we’re going to be able to prevail. The law, as in so many of these cases, is really clear. But even still, you never know once you get into the court system.

JW: Although you’ve sued Trump 40 times in his second term, I noticed that in your mailings. You do not say the courts will save us. You kind of say the opposite. Public Citizen urges everybody to take to the streets to protest, especially your big part of the No Kings coalition led by Indivisible. What exactly do you see as the relationship between people taking to the streets and public citizens going to court?

RW: Well, I think taking on an authoritarian regime like this means doing everything we possibly can, especially in the early days of the administration when they were moving in such a whirlwind. And then Elon Musk came in with DOGE and just started wiping out agencies and firing people. You know, it was felt most deeply here in Washington, D.C. but across the country, this sense of fear and hopelessness and unknowing, what could be done. And in that time, filing lawsuits wasn’t important just to stop the illegal actions, it was to show fight because people just felt scared and isolated, and they weren’t seeing fight from the political opposition. That’s an important component of the story.
So, the lawsuits, besides the merits of them, really help show fight, but they only do so much. And of course, the laws can be circumvented. And we have a hostile Supreme Court that goes out of its way when cases get there, to make rulings that advance the interests of the Trump administration. So, there’s no way that we can say, well, the lawsuits are going to be enough. I don’t think there’s one thing, but if there is one thing, the only one thing that ultimately defeats authoritarianism is uprising of the people.
So, I think in the sense that the interconnection, besides just saying we need all of the above, is that the lawsuits have helped inspire hope and shown the pathway to fighting. And it helped, I think helped encourage people to go out on the streets, which we’ve been doing in record numbers in the course of this last year, that’s going to continue. And now, as of course, we start to near the midterms, I think the emphasis is really going to be on making sure that everybody is registered, making sure everybody early votes, making sure everybody feels safe to vote, making sure the votes are counted and blocking any efforts at election sabotage, which is an acute problem unlike any we’ve ever had in American history. But we’re going to be able to succeed in that, I think because of all that’s come before, because of those mobilizations have got people finding their courage and finding their way forward and feeling the power of coming together. You know, we’ve seen the success, the tragedy, but the success too in Minnesota. And I think that’s going to empower us as we get through the rest of this year and the last two final years of this wretched administration.

JW: Rob Weissman, he’s co-president of the group Public Citizen. Rob, thanks for all your work and thanks for talking with us today.

RW: Always great to be with you. Thanks, Jon.
[BREAK]

JW: Now it’s time to talk about Bill Gates. He was once the country’s youngest billionaire–he was 31.  And he was the first billionaire to come from tech. He became the most hated man in America, then the biggest philanthropist and the world’s most admired man. And then we learned of his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein.  For that whole story, we turn to Ben Tarnoff. His latest book is called “Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed.” Wonderful title. His writing has appeared in The Nation, also The Atlantic, The New York Times, The Guardian, Jacobin, and The New York Review, where he wrote about Bill Gates. Ben Tarnoff, welcome to the program.

Ben Tarnoff: Hey, Jon, thanks so much for having me.

JW: When Gates co-founded Microsoft in 1975, he was only 20 years old. You say he was a new kind of capitalist overlord that has since become excruciatingly familiar. And you call him the nerd bully? You say these are men who spent their formative years getting stuffed into lockers at school, and they were now determined to get revenge. Tell us about young man. Gates.

BT: Well, there is a kind of psychological, temperamental, personal aspect to this, which is, you know, the one that I think we’re all, frankly quite sick of hearing about at this point, which is the the nerd who gets stuffed into lockers and then find themselves greatly rich and, and powerful and decide to get their revenge on the world. But there’s also, you know, a kind of material political, economic underpinning to this, which is that gates in the 1970s becomes a software entrepreneur, which at this stage of our history is quite commonplace, but was actually a new category. That software, commercial software being sold independently of hardware was a new thing in the 1970s, and gates is really the one who innovates the most lucrative business model around that new sector.

JW: And what kind of boss was Bill Gates at Microsoft?

BT: Not a great one. This is kind of legendary. He’s hectoring, micromanaging, dictatorial. He famously keeps track of the license plates of his employees so he can know when they’re arriving and departing. And the company parking lot. Not the kind of person you’d probably want to work for.

JW: Yeah, you call him arrogant, disdainful, indignant, angry, snide, condescending, petulant, contemptuous, truculent, evasive, hyper aggressive, despotic and bullying.

BT: Yes. Although, in fairness, that’s a quote from the book under review, which is by the journalist Anubrata Das, and it’s called billionaire nerd Savior King. And it’s a it’s a new book about Bill gates.

JW: So you say the Justice Department sued Microsoft for antitrust violations. That was 1998. You watched the video of Gates’s deposition from the trial, is that right?

BT: Well, you can see it on YouTube, actually, if you can endure it. And this is a, you know, relatively young Gates. I mean, it’s the 1990s, but he’s he’s he’s not terribly old at that point, acting quite imperiously, evasively, under questioning, you know, as part of the process of discovery for the for the antitrust suit. The videos are played in court, and the judge finds them so ridiculous that he actually laughs out loud. So this contributed to, you know, his declining reputation. Gates, you know, initially is kind of lauded as this boy genius. But certainly by the 1990s there’s a darker turn.
There’s a there’s a famous scene in the South Park movie that I recall at the opening of my piece, where Gates is actually executed by a US general during the invasion of Canada, which is a major plot point of the South Park movie, if anyone remembers. Because Windows crashes during this critical moment in the military campaign and Gates is killed. And I was sitting in the theater as a young man, and everyone starts cheering. So, you know, Gates, if those of us who can recall the late 1990s, was pretty widely vilified by that point.

JW: And this is all before what we now call Silicon Valley. Gates and Microsoft were in Seattle. Silicon Valley was kind of the next generation guys who set out to defy Bill Gates. You call him “the father they rebelled against.” Tell us about their rebellion.

BT: Well, in the 1990s, Silicon Valley is an important aspect of the US tech sector, but it does not yet have supremacy over the American, or indeed the global tech landscape. It’s better understood as one of a number of competing regions. And in fact, the Pacific Northwest and Microsoft in particular, is the leader. Microsoft is the tech giant at the time. It has a quite openly adversarial relationship with Silicon Valley. It’s constantly trying to poach its talent. It’s trying to exterminate its companies. The major war in the 1990s is between Microsoft and Netscape, which produces the most popular web browser of the time, Netscape Navigator, and is in fact annihilated by Microsoft’s Internet Explorer because they bundle their web browser with their operating system, which manages to really crush Netscape, which is based in Silicon Valley. So it is, quite unironically, a story of David and Goliath, underdog versus overdog. But Silicon Valley, though, it tried to distinguish itself as the non-evil counterpart to the evil empire up north. This is kind of the origin of that style of Silicon Valley progressivism, in contrast to kind of the corporate greed associated with Gates. In fact, they learn quite a lot from Gates, and that kind of monopolizing ruthlessness will be absorbed by Silicon Valley, in particular, as it emerges from the wreckage of the dotcom crash and becomes the leading sector, of not just the US technology industry, but the US economy as a whole. It embraces the playbook that Gates pioneered at Microsoft.

JW: And of course, a lot of what Silicon Valley does has to do with the internet. And Gates’s whole world was created before the internet. A lot of people say Gates did not see the internet coming until it was too late. Is that really true?

BT: The business models that are being innovated by Silicon valley dotcom firms in the 1990s, the promise of which is fulfilled by the platforms that arise in the 2000s–that’s not a business model that Microsoft ever really figures out. I mean, this is the the kind of surveillance capitalism business model, as Shoshana Zuboff calls it, where you’re amassing data about your users and then monetizing that data in a variety of ways, above all through the sale of targeted advertising. That’s ultimately the business model that makes the internet such an economic powerhouse. But it involves giving things away for free, right? You’re giving away services for free in exchange for the opportunity to manufacture data about your users. And giving something away for free was something that Gates never, ever wanted to do. It just cut deeply against his instincts.

JW: Yeah. What we’re talking about here is Google. You call it “a self-consciously anti-Microsoft company” because of this emphasis on free services. And what was it that Google discovered how to do to make money, even though they were selling their services for free, something that was anathema to Bill Gates?

BT: The notion that you could, through giving services away for free, acquire a large and devoted and active user base whose activity on your platform could generate data, that in turn could be converted into cash in all sorts of different ways. But in the case of Google and other in the same suit like Facebook: advertising, that that would be the model. And it works. I mean, it still works, miraculously, tremendously. But Gates, you know, the thing you have to remember about Gates is that he comes out of a milieu in the 1970s in which his primary antagonists are countercultural computer hobbyists who are giving software that they’ve developed for one another on an amateur basis for free, circulating it within, you know, Homebrew Computer Club and settings like that.  And to create Microsoft as a commercial software company, he has to take a strong stand against those folks. He, in fact, even denounces them for pirating Microsoft software. So he’s very antagonistic to the idea of free services, free software. But in fact, that will be the foundation eventually.

JW: Congress–this is in the early 80s–and then the courts established that, as you say, computer programs were intellectual property. You say they were defined by Congress and the courts as literary works that could be copyrighted, which makes software what you call “a genre of literature.” I hadn’t quite thought about that before. Of course, it was different from novels and short stories in one big way.

BT: Yeah, and that’s obviously a bit of a cheeky license on my part. But, you know, it’s funny to think about Moby Dick and Microsoft in the same frame. They’re making that case morally, that software is a creative act, that it deserves the protections of intellectual property. Of course, there’s a big difference between Moby Dick and Microsoft. I mean, one of many, which is that when you create a piece of software like Windows or Word, it’s very cheap to reproduce it infinitely and to sell it to people all over the world. And then, with the advent of networking, to transmit it virtually instantaneously. So what Gates finds is that when you take the easy route, reproducibility of digital information, and you fuse it with intellectual property protections, you’ve essentially created an infinite money machine.

JW: Something Herman Melville failed to do.

BT: That’s right. Sadly.

JW: Meanwhile, Gates has become this immensely unpopular figure, booed at the South Park screenings, and eventually he leaves the competition and becomes a philanthropist–where once again, he’s competing to be the biggest and the best philanthropist in history. Would you say he came pretty close?

BT: It’s a remarkable public relations makeover. In 2000, Gates formally steps down as Microsoft’s CEO and devotes himself full time to his charitable work through the Gates Foundation. And 15 years later, he’s the most admired man in the world. So he does engineer a real turnaround in his reputational fortunes. And it’s certainly partly deserved. I mean, there’s there’s quite a lot of debate on this question, but the Gates Foundation does almost certainly save millions of lives around the world.

JW: It has given away–how much? Over $100 billion since its inception, $8 billion in 2024 alone. It operates in 140 countries, employs more than 2000 people. But nevertheless, it’s become the target of a lot of criticism. What are the most important criticisms of the way Gates runs his foundation?

BT: Well, it’s a very hands on approach. You know, I think Mackenzie Bezos has this thing where she just gives an organization a ton of money and walks away. The Gates Foundation is sort of the opposite. If they come in, they want a lot of access. They want a lot of oversight. And it really continues to the present day to call the shots in the global health policy space. It’s enormously influential. So one obvious criticism is that why should one unelected billionaire be basically running global health policy for the entire world? That smacks of a kind of neocolonial arrangement.
There are also more specific criticisms. For instance, his response during the Covid pandemic prompted a lot of criticism because the foundation helped convince Oxford University to sell the vaccine it had developed, which it had received funding for from the British government, rather than sharing the science with developing developing countries for free.
So it has, you know, made a number of moves that have prompted criticism. But I think in general, you can see why a philanthropic venture of this scale and this ambition that’s being controlled by a single man in Seattle might might rub some people the wrong way.

JW: Especially one that is committed to preserving corporate power as it’s currently structured in the world.

BT: Yeah. The Gates Foundation is a leading exemplar of what some people call “philanthro-capitalism,” which is this effort to apply the methods of free enterprise to the problem of poverty. And there are perhaps those of us on the left that may be raising questions about how well the means and ends there are being matched. But in more concrete terms, it does generally incline towards preserving existing disparities of wealth, existing concentrations of corporate power, but hoping to alleviate the most extreme forms of human suffering within that frame.

JW: Now we get to the last chapter, or at least the most current chapter of the Bill Gates story. It’s the one titled “Epstein Ties.” Tell us about Bill Gates’s ties to Jeffrey Epstein–how we learned about them and what the biggest news was.

BT: We keep learning about more because there are more tranches of Epstein files that emerge. In the course of writing this piece, there was another Epstein drop that I had to account for. It’s not the part of the process that I enjoy the most. Gates and Epstein knew each other. They met multiple times over the course of the 2010s. Apparently, the entry point was that Epstein had pitched Gates on setting up what’s known as a donor advised fund for the Gates Foundation.  Essentially it would have made it easier for billionaires to contribute money to the foundation. Of course, Epstein himself would take a cut. So he was in it for self-interested reasons.
But Gates spent time with Epstein in New York, Florida, and on the private jet. There’s also, more recently, the revelation that Epstein acted as a kind of handler for this Russian bridge player who Gates had an affair with. There may, in fact, be more information that comes out, but this actually had a pretty big impact on Gates when the revelation started to materialize in the press: they contributed to the breakup of his marriage and certainly destabilized things at the foundation.

JW: You want to tell us about the revelations about the antibiotics?

BT: Oh, gosh, man, you really you like to get into the dirty details. This is something that reconstructing this is actually weirdly complex. There are these draft emails–I hope no one listening has actually suffered through going and looking at this– but there are these draft emails that that Epstein wrote to himself that appear to be styled as resignation letters written to Gates from this guy, Boris Nikolic, who was a science advisor for Gates. And these draft emails claim that Nikolic facilitated trysts for Gates and that he helped Gates get drugs in order to deal with sexually transmitted diseases–and in particular, that Gates had asked for antibiotics to secretly give to his wife, Melinda, to presumably inoculate her against those sexually transmitted diseases. Can’t believe I had to say all those sentences out loud.

JW: But we thank you. We thank you for your willingness to participate here. And then finally, finally, we get to Donald Trump. You’d think that no one would understand better than Bill Gates how truly terrible it was for Trump to shut down USAID. What kind of relationship does Bill Gates have with Donald Trump?

BT: Gates voiced criticism of that decision, and was was critical of Musk. But Gates has also been keen to demonstrate his, let’s say openness to working with Trump, perhaps even his his willingness to bend the knee to Trump. There’s a private dinner that they had, I guess not particularly private because we know about it, in January 2025. Shortly after Trump took office for the second time. And then there was another moment that a number of people from the tech industry got together at the White House in September, and Gates, sitting at a table with a number of other Silicon Valley luminaries, was praising Trump for his for his “incredible leadership.” You know, the kind of platitudes that that one often hears in the mouth of business leaders who are attempting to ingratiate themselves with the president.

JW: Yeah. “Incredible leadership” is a direct quote of how Gates described Trump at this dinner for Trump. And this is, of course, what Trump requires, but it does qualify for what you call “bending the knee.”

BT: I don’t know what’s going on inside of Gates’s head. I mean, presumably he thinks he’s playing realpolitik, that if he wants to avoid becoming a target, particularly his foundation becoming a target for the administration and continue the work that they want to do around the world, that he has to move strategically in this new environment and do whatever it takes. I think it’s probably the same calculus that a lot of other figures across industry are making. I think, you know, given Gates’s own nominal commitments to a number of issues through his foundation, it’s particularly grotesque. I think it’s not something that will age very well, but I’m sure he has his own rationalizations for it.

JW: So where do you end up with Bill Gates? You’ve spent, I don’t know, months thinking about him. Where does he get the credit? Where does he get the blame?

BT: I think it’s interesting to think about Gates as a shadow father figure for Silicon Valley. It’s not exactly how he’s remembered, because again, he is often thought about as the kind of malevolent rival of Silicon Valley, whose overthrow makes it possible for that particular region to attain its present level of supremacy. And in particular, a lot of emphasis has been laid on the cultural differences. At Microsoft, the vibe is just very different than at Google. Google, it’s all primary colors and beanbags. And “don’t be evil.” Microsoft is “the Death Star.” That’s the kind of stuff that as a kid I was really into — computers in the 1990s –I grew up just believing, I kind of absorbed that common sense. But actually, from the benefit of a few decades hindsight, we can see that actually there are some deeper affinities. And particularly as companies like Google have developed into their own Death Stars. They actually look more like siblings than enemies.

JW: Ben Tarnoff–he wrote about Bill Gates for the New York Review. Ben, this was great. Thanks for talking with us today.

BT: Thanks, Jon.